Top 10 Things to Do in Goa | Beaches, Old Goa and the Interior
Goa is not one place. The north and the south are different holidays, half this list is nowhere near a beach, and the month you arrive decides what is even open.
North or south? Decide this first
Everything else on this page is downstream of one choice.
Goa is a small state with two entirely different holidays inside it, roughly two hours apart on a good day and rather longer on a bad one. Travellers who book the wrong half do not have a bad time, but they do spend their week in a car.
| North Goa | South Goa | |
|---|---|---|
| The feel | Busy, social, dense | Quiet, spread out, slow |
| Beaches | Lively, shack-lined, walkable to the next one | Long, empty, sometimes yours alone |
| Evenings | Markets, music, restaurants | Dinner, stars, bed |
| Best for | First-timers who want stimulation, groups, market shoppers | Couples, families, readers, anyone recovering from work |
| The catch | It is not restful | Fewer restaurants, you will drive to things |
Our honest read after years of booking this state: most Australian couples and families ask for north Goa and would have preferred south Goa. The north's reputation does the marketing and the south does the holiday. If you cannot decide, split it, three nights each, and accept one transfer day in the middle. Ask us which half suits your trip.
The ten
1. Old Goa's churches, at opening
Ten or so kilometres inland from Panaji sits what was once one of the largest cities in the world, a Portuguese capital that plague and the shifting river eventually emptied. What remains is a small group of enormous churches standing in mown grass, and the Basilica of Bom Jesus is the one everyone comes for, holding the relics of St Francis Xavier.
Go before the coaches. The Se Cathedral across the lawn is the biggest church in Asia by some measures and is usually almost empty while the queue builds next door. An hour and a half, cool stone, and the strangest history in India. Compare Old Goa tours on Viator.
2. Fontainhas, Panaji's Latin quarter
The best walk in the state, and it takes forty minutes.
A hillside pocket of the capital where the houses are painted ochre, indigo and lime by local convention, the street names are Portuguese, the balcões (the front porches built for watching the street) are still in use, and bakeries still turn out poi bread each morning. It is small, it is lived in rather than restored for tourists, and it is the clearest surviving picture of what Goa was before it was a beach.
Go early or late. Midday sun flattens it.
3. A spice plantation, for the lunch
The tour is fine. The lunch is the point.
An hour inland the landscape turns to areca, pepper vines, cardamom, vanilla and cashew, and the plantations run a couple of hours of walking followed by a Goan thali served on a banana leaf under a roof of palm. You will learn how a peppercorn grows, which is genuinely interesting once, and you will eat one of the better meals of your trip, which is interesting every time.
Most run daily in season and take walk-ups.
4. Dudhsagar Falls, and only by the official jeep
One of India's tallest waterfalls, four tiers of it coming off the Western Ghats through jungle, with a railway line crossing the face of it.
The rule that catches people out: you cannot drive yourself there. Access runs through a booked jeep safari from the collection point at Mollem inside the sanctuary, numbers are capped daily, and in the busy months the day's allocation goes early. The falls are also seasonal in the most literal sense, thunderous from the monsoon through to about December and a modest trickle by late in the dry season. Find Dudhsagar trips on Klook.
5. A shack afternoon that runs into the evening
The single most Goan thing available, and the one people underrate because it sounds like nothing.
You take a table on the sand at about four, you order fish, you stay for the sunset, and you leave at nine. That is the whole activity. It works because the shacks are built for exactly this, and because the light on this coast in the dry season does something worth sitting still for.
Know that they are temporary. Beach shacks go up and come down every year under seasonal licences, so the beach you saw in a December photograph is bare sand in July. This is the fact that surprises most monsoon visitors.
6. Divar Island on the free ferry
A flat-bottomed ferry from the Old Goa jetty, no ticket, a few minutes across the Mandovi, and you are on an island of empty lanes, old churches and rice paddy where almost nothing has happened for a century.
Take a scooter or a bike across, get lost for two hours, come back. It is the cheapest good day in Goa and most visitors never hear about it. Nearby Chorao Island holds the Salim Ali bird sanctuary, mangrove-fringed and best at first light.
7. The markets, if your season allows
The Anjuna flea market and the Saturday night market at Arpora are institutions, and both are seasonal: they run in the dry months and vanish in the monsoon.
Anjuna is daytime, hot and enormous. Arpora is an evening, with food stalls and live music, and it is the more enjoyable of the two by a distance. Bargain, expect to, and do not take the first price on anything. Our Goa travel guide has the practical detail on both.
8. A boat out to Grande Island
The day trip most people book, and it deserves an honest description.
The snorkelling here is decent rather than world class, the visibility depends entirely on how recently it rained, and the boats can be crowded. What makes it worth doing is the day itself: an hour out across the Arabian Sea, a swim off the boat, lunch aboard, dolphins often on the way. Book a smaller operator if you can, and set expectations at "good day on a boat" rather than "reef trip". See Grande Island trips on Viator.
9. A Goan meal that is actually Goan
The menu most Australians know is north Indian. Goan food is a separate cuisine with Portuguese in its bloodstream, and the tourist strips will happily sell you butter chicken instead.
Find xacuti (coconut and roasted spice), cafreal (green, herby, Portuguese-African), sorpotel, ambot tik, a fish curry rice that a Goan household would recognise, and bebinca, a layered coconut and egg dessert baked one layer at a time. And a vindaloo as it is meant to be, a vinegar and garlic braise, not a dare.
The best versions are in family-run places away from the sand.
10. One day of nothing in the south
Not a joke, and not filler.
The south's beaches, Palolem, Agonda, Patnem, Cola, are long, clean and largely undeveloped, and the correct itinerary for one of your days is a book, a sun lounger, lunch, a swim and no plan whatsoever. Goa is one of the few places in India where doing nothing is the genuine local skill, and travellers who schedule every day here go home tired.
If you booked the north, drive down for a day. It is worth the two hours.
The month decides the Goa you get
| When | What it is like |
|---|---|
| November to February | The season. Dry, warm, everything open, the markets running, the shacks up. Also the busiest and the most expensive. |
| March to May | Hot and getting hotter, humidity climbing, shacks winding down towards the end. Quiet beaches, hard midday sun. |
| June to September | Monsoon. Green, dramatic, cheap, empty, and the sea is not for swimming. Shacks down, water sports closed, falls magnificent. |
| October | The reset. The rain stops, everything reopens over a few weeks, and the state is green and uncrowded at once. Our quiet favourite. |
The one caveat on October: reopening is gradual and not synchronised, so early in the month you may find the landscape at its best and half the shacks still being nailed together.
Three things Goa is not
It is not a party state. The reputation belongs to a handful of spots in a small stretch of the north. The other ninety percent of the coastline is families, fishing villages and people asleep by ten.
It is not culturally thin. The Portuguese held this territory for over four centuries, considerably longer than the British held anything in India, and it left a Konkani-Catholic-Hindu culture that exists nowhere else, with the churches, the food, the music and the house architecture to prove it.
It is not one long beach. Half of this list is inland. The interior, the ghats, the plantations, the islands and the old capital are where Goa stops being a resort and starts being a place.
The airport is a decision, not a detail
Goa has two international airports now: Dabolim, the older one in the centre-south of the state, and Manohar International at Mopa in the far north, which opened relatively recently and has been taking a growing share of the traffic.
They are not interchangeable. Mopa to the southern beaches is a long, expensive transfer at the end of a long flight, and Dabolim to the far north is not much better. Because there are no non-stops from Australia, the connection you take through the hub determines which airport you land at, which determines how your first evening goes. This is exactly the sort of thing worth having checked before it is booked, and it is why our Sydney to Goa flights page treats the arrival airport as part of the fare rather than an afterthought. Get a Goa fare quote with the right airport.
Booking notes
Prices shown by our partners are live and in your choice of currency, most activities confirm instantly, and free cancellation windows are stated on each listing. Goa needs less advance booking than almost anywhere we cover: the plantations, churches, markets and beaches all take you as you come. Book ahead for a Dudhsagar jeep in the busy months and for diving or boat trips, and leave the rest to the day.